sarah mclean

Hi Michael, Your video for your elevator pitch was a lot of fun, but I agree with Silvia that hearing a voice would be nice too. I think your idea is simple and clean and I think that you hit on the pain point well that learning a language doesn't work unless you are actually conversing in that language! I know you focused on the money-making aspect of this venture, which makes sense from your point-of-view, but I was just wondering if chatbots and Facial recognition software is advanced enough to really help with the immersion and conversation that you would desire with your product. Cheers Sarah

Hi Jennifer, Great elevator pitch. You were clear, confident, and it was obvious that you were passionate about the project as well. I love the graphics and "screenshots" that you included for Stardew Valley. Though I see in your reflection that you found it challenging to differentiate your product from Prodigy, I think you explained some key points in your venture pitch. In particular, I really like how you can look study a number of different subjects with Stardew Valley, whereas most other educational games that I have seen usually only focus on one subject. Great job. Sarah

Hello Jiri, I thought your elevator pitch was great. You clearly identified the pain point and it was easy to see why your venture makes sense. For your venture pitch I really liked how you embedded the videos to further explain your concepts- I thought this was a great way to do it. I also thought that your venture pitch was strong in terms of its market analysis. Finally, I like how you have the two phases for investment as well- I thought this made a lot of sense and gave a sense of flexibility to your potential investors. Good job overall! Sarah

Hi Melissa, I really enjoyed listening to your elevator pitch and reading through your venture pitch. I think that one of the interesting parts of your pitch was how you appealed to the listeners to share your idea via social media, even if they weren't able to help financially. I thought that this was an interesting idea and would likely appeal to most people who would watch your video- sharing on Twitter is pretty easy to do! Your passion for your project is also obvious and comes through- one small suggestion, I think that maybe you were reading off of a cue card for your video- perhaps consider putting the cue cards behind the camera so that you are looking up more. I found it a little distracting when you kept looking down. Other than that, I think that your pain point and rationale for your project were superb. I will certainly be sharing it on social media! Sarah

Hello Johnny, Good work on your Mathlandia pitches. I thought that throughout both presentations you had a great conversational tone which made me interested in learning more and also made me feel at ease. I agree with your reflection in that I like how you drew on Seymour Papert's work for your inspiration, however, I am unsure how Mathlandia fully embraces constructionism. My understanding of constructionism is that students learn best by constructing and sharing the meaning or knowledge artifacts that they create. Do you mean that by participating in the virtual world students will be "sharing" their knowledge? Another really cool part of your pitch was how you outlined the competitive edge of your particular product compared to the other products available- I thought you did this in an easy-to-understand manner and that you made it very clear (I wish I had done this fo rmy pitch!) The only other constructive feedback I have is that I found a few of your slides a little wordy/fuzzy, so I found it hard to follow along with what you were saying while also trying to read the slides. Overall, I think you did a good job and really like how you gave the context of your own educational experiences when coming up with Mathlandia. Cheers, Sarah

Hi Judy, I agree that with Sarah that you definitely found a gap and the "pain point" is very clearly articulated. I also think that the integration between different types of games as lessons as well as scenarios make it very interesting and likely very useful for the student. I can see my financially-savvy husband investing in something like this! In terms of your elevator pitch, I found it to be a bit wordy and repetitive at times. While I don't know if you necessarily have to "show yourself" in the video, having a voice-over or some other type of audio would have made it more engaging. Your website was relatively easy to navigate and I really enjoyed your logo for your idea. Cheers, Sarah

Hi Marc, this was a really delightful venture pitch to read! I feel that you established yourself early on as someone credible that I would definitely consider investing in. I agree with some of the other comments that there could have been a little more pizzazz in your video, I think your venture pitch was very well laid out and addressed. One quick bit of feedback would be the length of the presentation- 31 slides would likely be challenging to fit into an 8 minute venture pitch. However, I thought your use of graphics and statistics was very thorough and it was obvious that you had done thorough research into the market. One thing that I was not too clear about was how CityLearn is different from the competitors that you mentioned- I was trying to evaluate what benefit there would be in investing in your idea vs. your competitors. Another great selling point that I think you made was the collaboration with local non-profit organizations and businesses. I think this would be a very valuable approach and I am sure that you would get lots of buy-in from the neighbourhoods if you shared stories of these businesses. Great job overall! Sarah

Hello Adaptive Learning Group, thanks for your highly informative OER. I was very impressed that you created the different personas for us to explore and therefore enabled all of us to look at adaptive learning from multiple lenses. I found it interesting that many of your team members identified as "Susans"; I wonder if your OER would have looked different if you had more Anthonys or Jeremiahs (just a thought!). Like Chava, I agree that you could have perhaps given a little more insight as to why you focused solely on adaptive learning through mathematics education. At first glance, my thoughts would be that it is relatively straightforward to "scale-up" the difficulty of a math problem based on a student's performance, but this might be more challenging in the Arts or Humanities. I also noticed that a lot of your analysis focused on K-12, thought you did include some aspects of higher education. Does the landscape look particularly different between K-12 and higher ed? Or is the venture landscape in the "Trough of Disillusionment" both at the K-12 and higher ed levels? Finally, I really like how you integrated aspects of ethical considerations into your discussion, like Marc said. When I think back to the OER that I created, I think this was an aspect of the analysis that I did not consider and could have been interesting for digital textbooks. The shoe analogy video at the end was great, and I think you could have possibly extended this ethical piece a bit more, as I remember recently that there was controversy regarding Google's autocomplete and predictions and the steps that they are doing to address this issue. Anyways, well done and very insightful! Sarah

Kudos to you, team Personalized Learning. I really enjoyed your OER and thought that it was inventive that you offered your OER in the different formats. I found that this helped to influence my own understanding of my learning as I actually found that the printed and audio version helped me most. On a side note, I really liked how you embedded questions in your videos. Is the program that you used to do this free? I could see this being an awesome addition to some of the videos that I currently have for my students. In terms of your content, I think that your OER was well-researched and thoughtful. I thought that your reflection questions were interesting and timely, and related well to the information that you presented. One suggestion I would have for the video segment of your OER would be to consider having either an animation or a voice-over on some of the slides. I found it challenging to keep up with the content when listening to the presenter, and in a way, it seemed more equivalent to an audio recording of the material. I think that if you had some images interspersed with the presenter (who did an excellent job, by the way) this would make this component of the OER easier to follow along. Other than that, I thought that the work that you presented was well-established in the literature and made a lot of sense. I also appreciate how you spent some time considering the potential pitfalls of PL, and I really liked your point about how PL software is not "pedagogically neutral"- it certainly gave me some food for thought! Thank you for putting together such a cogent and easy-to-navigate OER on PL. I learned a lot. Sarah

Hello Mobile Learning Team, thank you for including some interesting considerations for this week's OER. At first, I was a bit uncertain about trying to use your OER on my phone (sometimes I have found that websites created with "Wix" for example don't work really well), but was happy to see that your OER looked the same on my phone as it did on the website. Your website was simple to navigate. I divide my social media usage into "professional" and "personal". For professional social media, I use Twitter, LinkedIn, and I have a professional Facebook profile. I use my married surname for my personal social media use, so my colleagues and students generally can't "find" my personal accounts. In terms of your OER, I think it may have been helpful to focus on one aspect of social media in education- I think the challenge with your topic is that it can be incredibly broad so getting to the complexities of any of the social media modalities is tough. For example, I know that in higher education Twitter is very popular among academics and there is beginning to be some research on the impact of Twitter for educational purposes (example: Tang, Y., & Hew, K. F. (2017). Using Twitter for education: Beneficial or simply a waste of time?. Computers & Education, 106, 97-118). I think that having more of a research-focused approach to your OER would have lended some credibility to aspects of your narratives. That being said, it was straightforward and easy for me to access your OER and go through your resources and activities. I am comfortable using Twitter, but I notice that a number of our peers are not as comfortable- perhaps it would have been a good idea to provide them with other options for activities to ensure their engagement as well. One final suggestion- I was surprised that you did not reference UBC's digital tattoo website (https://digitaltattoo.ubc.ca/) as this has many resources available for both instructors and students for them to consider their digital presence. I plan on incorporating some of the lessons for my students for next semester.